Barack’s Benefactor, the Purple Behemoth known as the SEIU…

Well, a new left-wing movie by producer Glenn Silber, called The War at Home; Part 2 is coming out soon that is featuring none other than BHO’s purple puppet master, the Service Employees International Union, aka the SEIU.

Some comments on the SEIU’s role in putting Obama in the White House.

“After 2000 and 2004, I just couldn’t live with another loss like that,” Silber says. Barack Obama had not yet declared his candidacy, but “I knew that Hillary was going to run, I thought Edwards was going to run, and I knew about SEIU.” With more than 2 million members, he says, the union is “the biggest-kept secret in the country in terms of being a political player. I’d seen what they’d done in ’04 and knew it was going to be a major throw-down for them.”

Unsure how the union’s role in the election would play out, Silber started doing internal production work for SEIU. This afforded him behind-the-scenes access to its members’ political action conference, and the “Walk a Day in My Shoes” exercise, in which Obama, Clinton and other candidates vying for the union’s endorsement spent a day working alongside an SEIU member. Skeptical at first, he found the experience of filming these episodes very moving.

When he screened the Obama short at last year’s Service Employees International Union convention, Silber says, “people went crazy. The room was on fire.” Recognizing the possibility of a strong narrative arc, he began to entertain the vague notion of producing a full-scale documentary. He proposed covering the Democratic National Convention from SEIU’s perspective. The union’s leaders approved….

The union came through with funding to complete the film, and is acknowledged in the credits for its cooperation and financial backing. Silber understands that taking money from the subjects of your documentary invites criticism on ethical grounds. “I don’t give a rip, okay? That’s the short answer,” he says, citing his reputation all the way back to his first documentary, An American Ism: Joe McCarthy, in 1978….

Silber has shown the film to friends and says they have recognized in it “a paradigm of how a union gets involved in a political situation,” marshals its membership, conceives a strategy and executes it.

The Service Employees International Union is deploying these same methods now to drive health care reform, Silber notes, but he harbors no illusions regarding the heavy lifting still to be done.